For all the boardroom certainty about getting everyone back to the office, the office is a recent invention. Modern humans have existed for 300,000 years; the purpose-built office is barely 300, the first being London’s Old Admiralty in 1726. For most of human history, nobody went to the office to earn a living.
Yet the office is now in retreat. Global attendance sits roughly 30% below pre-pandemic levels, and companies are shrinking their footprints. Three forces explain why this is structural, and not just a passing phase.
Three Big Shifts
First, technology has removed the reason to commute. People once came in because the expensive machinery lived there—in the late 1960s, a single photocopy could cost a quarter. Today a home device costs a fraction of that and does more. Video calls finished the job, and VR collaboration is spreading fast in hubs like Bengaluru.
Second, flexible work is genuinely working for knowledge workers. Research points to two-to-three office days as the productivity sweet spot. On paper, employers appear to be winning the tug of war—most job ads still demand full-time attendance. But postings are what employers want, not what staff will accept. Most workers want hybrid or remote; only 16% want five days at a desk, and economists value hybrid at about 8% of salary, according to research consolidated from Robert Half 2026, KPMG CEO Outlook 2025, Stanford SIEPR and Deloitte 2025. More than half of workers (55%) prefer hybrid mode and about 76% say they would quit if expected to work full time from the office.
Third, AI is hollowing out the jobs that fill office floors. Unlike earlier tools, it targets office work itself—drafting, analysing, coding. White-collar hiring in India has stalled for three years. PwC finds entry-level employment in AI-exposed roles down around 13%—and entry-level hiring is what fills desks. This is not a fringe view: the major forecasters disagree on scale, not direction, and the exposure maps onto the traditional office floor.
New Work Order
Here, leadership and reality diverge. In KPMG’s 2025 survey, 83% of CEOs expect a full return by 2027—yet 88% of managers running hybrid teams have no such plans, and roughly three in four workers would quit rather than come back five days a week, rising to 65% of Gen Z and millennials. The C-suite is bracing for a return that isn’t coming—which is why so many mandates quietly stall.
For professionals, the shift cuts both ways. Indians reclaim at least ten hours a week of commuting time, but more will move into AI-related gig and freelance work—Infosys sees generative AI displacing 92 million roles while creating 170 million. Freelancers, though, get no safety net: they must self-fund the buffers and health cover their employers once provided.
Keeping the Best
For HR, rigid return mandates are a retention risk in exactly the markets where talent is scarcest. And work is migrating to cities 30–50% cheaper than the metros—Indore, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Lucknow—with people set to follow.
None of this means the office vanishes; the best buildings are fine. What is ending is the assumption that a job means a fixed desk, in a fixed city, on a fixed nine-to-five—a 300-year-old answer to a factory-age problem. The leaders who recognise that, rather than fighting it, will keep their best people.
Saurabh Mukherjea and Nandita Rajhansa work for Marcellus Investment Managers.
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